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Andrew Marcus

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When I picked up The Pete Best Band's Live at the Adelphi, the hipster at the cash register smirked behind his foggy glasses. Having once been a record clerk myself, I knew what the clerk was thinking: "This sad sack must be one of those Beatleshe...

Joe Ely was born along the Rock Island line in Amarillo, Texas, three blocks from Route 66. At age six, he witnessed Jerry Lee Lewis pounding a piano on the back of a flatbed truck; at 12, his family moved two hours south to Lubbock, the hometown ...

Like Popeye and Jonathan Richman, Steve Forbert is what he is. In 28 years of playing sun-dappled heartland rock with the occasional sidelong glance of cynicism, he's only gotten to sound more like his own earnest self. But then, you don't expect ...

Inventing punk was a dirty job. You had to make up new rules for the guitar, cram your hairy appendages into ladies' pumps and lingerie, get hooked on hard drugs and squeeze Howlin' Wolf and the Shangri-Las into the same three-minute songs. That r...

Stephin Merritt has come out of the closet: Of course! You're a theatrical composer! It must have been so hard passing as a pop singer all those years. The leader of Magnetic Fields and sundry other indie broods slides into musical theater so easi...

With delicate tunes and referential album titles like The Boy with the Arab Strap, Belle & Sebastian main man Stuart Murdoch is a cult artist who has more or less birthed a scene of pop miniaturists known as twee. But Murdoch is moving ever closer...